Innovations in the early morning hours!

This is early Saturday morning and I was woken up by a phone call from India. Had to sit up and do some Google for a sample piece of code that allows to connect and transfer files from Windows machine to a UNIX machine and vice-versa. Though I have written many similar programs on a Windows box in VB6 as well as VB.Net and C# 2.0, they were all simple programs to interact with TCP/IP based servers and clients. I was not sure if this one would be different, so thought I'll give Google a chance too :D.

It came up with quite a few links but interestingly it is not supposed to be any different than whatever code I have written in the past. Still could not make up my mind to write some sample code again so early in the morning... that too on a weekend! Oh, c'mon man. give me a break!

So decided to forward the links with some sample codes.
I have started to like Google ! :). I remember, in my starting days as a programmer, we were a bunch of excited thunderbolts (Yes, all of them were thunderbolts) working @ NSDL thinking we can program any damn thing in no time. And frankly speaking WE DID!. But the code we wrote might not have been the best quality code, I guess. We wrote a full fledged PAN and TAN systems for Government of India. The architecture of the system still brings smile on my face.
We were supposed to develop a windows service. So far none of us (including our seniors and module leaders) had written a windows service. With no access to Google at that time, my module leader decided I'll have to write a program that will continue in an infinite do ...while loop. With proper CPU usage and proper handling of all possible cases, I wrote it. Frankly speaking, we were just two people at one point of time working on the system: Me and Amol Patil. Everyone who knows Amol can easily guess that it was Amol's idea :D. haha ! We got a huge client appreciation for developing the application (so called Windows service) which used to keep an eye on the changed files in multiple Windows directories on local machine and process them. We achieved processing as good a number as 14000 files a day initially which obviously went up as the aplications started cooming during early March (Tax filing time in April :)). And believe me or not, that was a huge number for NSDL and Government of India :D.
A few days later I did stumble upon a way, on local MSDN help, to implement Windows service. Though, it seemed to me to have been written in Arabic, still I managed to write my first Windows service with no infinite do ...while loop at 4 AM in the morning. :D. That was an amazing experience. I felt elated and so happy. It felt like I was the best programmer in the world :D, only to get an enlightening comment from my colleague & friend (Shaji) to stop working on desktop development projects since the world is going web.
My bragging came to an end the very same day only to bring up a new full featured intranet website the following morning! Voila! Watch this stupid guy. That again was in the early morning hours! I kept myself awake throughout the previous night to bring up my first website and I aptly named it as Victory. hehe :). Shaji brought me into the web-world! I really thank him to this day :D. Otherwise I would have remained a kid doing a lot of desktop development. Thanks Shaji. and thanks Amol.

I begin to think, all my innovations have happened in the early morning hour. Before this really gets into my head, I better go to sleep again!